South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Beyond the virus statistics
As the US death toll crawls closer to 1 million, it’s difficult to count what’s been lost. For many, it’s impossible. The void lasts forever.
On the deadliest day of a horrific week in April 2020, COVID19 took the lives of 816 people in New York City. Lost in the blizzard of pandemic data that’s been swirling ever since is the fact that 43-year-old Fernando Morales was one of them.
Two years and nearly
1 million deaths later, his brother, Adam Almonte, fingers the bass guitar Morales left behind and visualizes him playing tunes, a treasured blue bucket hat pulled low over his eyes.
Walking through a park overlooking the Hudson River, he recalls long-ago days tossing a baseball with Morales and sharing tuna sandwiches.
He replays old messages just to hear Morales’ voice.
“When he passed away, it was like I lost a brother, a parent and a friend all at the same time,” says Almonte, 16 years younger than Morales, who shared his love of books, video games and wrestling, and worked for the city processing teachers’ pensions. “I used to call him just any time I was going through something difficult and I needed reassurance, knowing he would be there ... That’s an irreplaceable type of love.”
If losing one person leaves such a lasting void, consider all that’s been lost with the deaths of 1 million.
Soon, the U.S. toll from the coronavirus will surpass that once unthinkable milestone. Yet after a two-year drumbeat of deaths, even 1 million can feel abstract.
“We’re dealing with numbers that humans are just not able to comprehend,” says Sara Cordes, a professor of psychology at Boston College who studies the way people perceive quantity. “I can’t comprehend the lives of 1 million at one time, and I think this is sort of self-preservation, to only think about the few that you have heard about.”
It goes far beyond faces and names.
COVID-19 has left an estimated 194,000 children in the country without one or both of their parents.
It has deprived communities of leaders, teachers and caregivers.
It has robbed us of expertise and persistence, humor and devotion.
Through wave after wave, the virus has compiled a merciless chronology of loss — one by one by one.
It began even before the threat had really come into focus.
In February 2020, an unfamiliar respiratory illness started spreading through a nursing home outside Seattle, the Life Care Center of Kirkland.
Surreal moment
Neil Lawyer, 84, was a short-term patient there, recovering after hospitalization for an infection.
On the last Wednesday of the month he joined other residents for a belated Mardi Gras party. But the songs that filled the entertainment room were interrupted by frequent coughing. Before week’s end, the facility was in lockdown.
Days later Lawyer, too, fell ill.
“By the time he got to the hospital, they allowed us to put on these space suits and go in and see him,” son David Lawyer says. “It was pretty surreal.”
When the elder Lawyer died of complications from COVID-19 on March 8, the U.S. toll stood at 30.
Eventually 39 Life Care residents and seven others linked to the facility died in the outbreak.
By any account, Lawyer — known to his family as “Moose” — lived a full life. Born on a Mississippi farm to parents whose mixedrace heritage subjected them to bitter discrimination, he became the first in his family to graduate from college.
Trained as a chemist, he took an assignment in Belgium with a U.S. company and stayed for more than two decades. Fellow expats knew him for his devotion to coaching baseball and for the rich baritone he brought to community theater and vocal ensembles.
“He had the most velvetlike voice,” says Marilyn Harper, who harmonized with Lawyer many times. “He loved to perform, but not in a showy way. He just got such great pleasure.”
After Lawyer and his wife retired to Bellevue, Washington, to be near two of their children, he embraced his role as grandfather of 17.
When his energy for performing diminished, he visited clubs to hear his grandson play guitar. At weddings, he joined his sons, grandson and nephew to serenade brides and grooms in a makeshift ensemble
dubbed the Moose-Tones.
Last October, when one of his granddaughters married, it marked the first family affair without Lawyer there to hold court.
The Moose-Tones went on without him.
“He would have just been beaming because, you know, it was the most important thing in the world to him late in life, to get together with family,” David Lawyer says.
A dose of hope
By the end of March
2020, deaths in the U.S. topped 3,500 and the federal government’s lead expert on infectious diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, predicted
COVID-19 would eventually take more than 100,000 lives.
Still, the idea that the toll could reach 1 million was “almost certainly off the chart,” he said at the time. “Not impossible, but very, very unlikely.”
Then deaths in the Northeast began to soar.
President Donald Trump dropped talk of reopening the nation by Easter.
In April, the U.S. surpassed Italy as the country with the most COVID-19 deaths.
By late spring of 2020 the pandemic seemed to be loosening its grip. That is until governors moved to reopen their states and deaths spiraled again, especially in the South and Southwest.
On Dec. 14, 2020, cameras jockeyed for position as the nation’s first COVID-19 vaccine was administered to a New York nurse, in time for the morning news shows.
“I feel like healing is coming,” she said. But the vaccines had arrived too late to save a fellow caregiver, Jennifer McClung.
At Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama, staffers knew McClung, a longtime dialysis nurse, as “Mama Jen.” When new nurses started, she took
them under her wing. When staffers on other floors had questions, they called her for advice. Some nights, she woke up crying with worry about her patients, her family says.
In November, McClung,
54, and her husband, John, also a hospital worker, both tested positive.
“Mama, I feel like I’m never coming home again,” McClung texted her mother, Stella Olive, from a hospital bed. Her lungs severely damaged by the virus, she died just hours before the nation’s vaccination campaign began. Later that day, the U.S. toll passed
300,000.
At a memorial service, McClung’s body lay dressed in nursing scrubs at her family’s request. The following day, heading home after getting her first shot, nurse Christa House became so upset she had to pull over.
If only the vaccine had come in time for her friend and colleague, “she might have made it,” House told herself.
Today, a decal with a halo and angel’s wings marks the place McClung once occupied at a third-floor nurses’ station. In Olive’s kitchen, a digital picture frame displays a steady stream of pictures and videos of the daughter she lost.
“I can hear her laugh. I can hear her voice,” McClung’s mother says. “I just can’t touch her. It is the hardest thing in the world.”
Skepticism
By early last summer, lines at vaccine sites had dwindled and daily COVID-19 deaths had declined by tenfold. Then the virus reinvented itself.
In southwest Missouri, where immunization rates had stalled at around 20 percent in some counties, hospitals were swamped by a surge among unvaccinated residents, people like Larry Quackenbush.
Quackenbush, 60, was the glue that held his family together. After wife Cathie suffered brain damage in a car accident more than 20 years ago, he became the primary caregiver, while working as a video producer for the Assemblies of God denomination in Springfield.
When his 12-year-old son, Landon, came home from summer camp sick with COVID-19, Quackenbush stepped up again.
Like many in the area, the family wasn’t vaccinated. The shot made Cathie nervous. Mindful of her husband’s heart problems and Parkinson’s disease, though, she gave Larry permission to get it. He never did. “Even when he started feeling sick, he kept taking care of everybody,” daughter Macy Sweeters says.
In July, first Larry, then Cathie were rushed to the hospital. She was able to return home a day later, but her husband remained, tethered to a ventilator.
He died Aug. 3, as the U.S. toll topped 614,000.
More deaths
Even when the delta wave ebbed, the toll continued to rise.
Last August, Sherman Peebles, a sheriff ’s deputy in Columbus, Georgia, went away for a week of leadership training. On the way home, he was laboring so hard to breathe he drove straight to the emergency room.
Peebles, 49, was widely known in Columbus as Uncle Sherman, devoted to community, church and family.
After nearly two decades on patrol and working in the county jail, he was a fixture in the courthouse, where he was the sergeant in charge. Every Saturday, he manned a barber chair at best friend Gerald Riley’s shop, dispensing small talk along with haircuts, and admonishing young customers to stay out of trouble.
At home, he doted on wife, ShiVanda, his sweetheart since high school. The couple ran a business together, renting bouncy houses and popcorn carts for parties. But their partnership was much more. After ShiVanda had a kidney transplant, he turned their trips to Atlanta for continued care into mini-vacations, taking her to Braves games and out for dinner.
“He called me his queen,” she says.
In late September, as Peebles lay in the hospital, the U.S. toll topped 675,000, surpassing the number of Americans killed by the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago.
He died the following day.
Omicron
The doctors and nurses were fighting for their lives.
And so, at 7 every evening through the spring of 2020, Larry Mass and Arnie Kantrowitz threw open the windows to thank them, joining New York’s symphony of pan banging, air horns and raucous cheers.
Mass, a psychiatrist, felt reassured by the city’s energy.
But he worried about his partner, whose immune system was weakened by anti-rejection drugs required after a kidney transplant.
For months, Kantrowitz, a retired professor and noted gay rights activist, took refuge on their couch, watching favorite Bette Davis movies with Mass by his side.
Kantrowitz, cinnamonbearded as a young man, had long identified with the iconic red-headed actress. “Getting old ain’t for sissies,” she’s widely credited with saying.
Even as Kantrowitz grew older and frailer, he held on to his admiration for her spunk.
It helped sustain the
81-year-old through most of last year. But that and a booster shot were not enough when the omicron variant swept the city in December.
Kantrowitz died of complications from COVID
19 on Jan. 21, as the toll moved nearer to 1 million.
On days when news headlines leave Mass feeling angry about the world, he reaches out to his missing partner.
What would Kantrowitz say if he were here? Words of calm and conscience were always one of his special gifts.
“He’s still with me,” Mass says. “He’s there in my heart.”